If you don't mind me asking, do you have any insights into the skill of making yourself heavy? As this is one of the things that impressed me most about BJJ black belts I've trained with and there doesn't seem to be much on it in Judo circles.

During a demonstration of yoko shiho gatame, a Brazilian judoka said you could make yourself feel heavier to your opponent by exhaling and taking shallow breaths to make yourself flatten out more atop your opponent. Don't know if he got that from BJJ guys or if making oneself heavier is a part of Brazilian judo.

There's a school of GJJ just down the road from me. I mistakenly assumed it would be the same as other BJJ schools.

The instructor then proceeded to lecture me at length as to how worthless sport jiu jitsu was, and that I would be rebuilding myself from the ground up, and that my sport jiu jitsu rank was worthless, and it would take many tests to see if I had mastered the self defense moves to advance, and also there's no sparring.

I wash my hands of you, GJJ.

Although having a black belt would be pretty sweet.

Saying that "sport BJJ" is useless is like saying that randori and shiai are useless to Judo. Neither are true. Both build tremendous skills. That said, while I don't think that success in either competitive/sport Judo or BJJ is the ultimate destination, I also agree that you can't throw randori & shiai away, that would effectively neuter the arts.

"Judo is a study of techniques with which you may kill if you wish to kill, injure if you wish to injure, subdue if you wish to subdue, and, when attacked, defend yourself" - Jigoro Kano (1889)
***Was this quote "taken out of context"?***

"The judoist has no time to allow himself a margin for error, especially in a situation upon which his or another person's very life depends...."
~ The Secret of Judo (Jiichi Watanabe & Lindy Avakian), p.19

"Hope is not a method... nor is enthusiasm."
~ Brigadier General Gordon Toney

...More and more people are turning to the Gracie Combatives program because BJJ schools are not providing what most people are lokking for self defense...
....BJJ is a fighing art first and foremost but if Black Belts don't teach it as such then you will come up with a watered down version of Jiu-Jitsu which seems to being more the norm. I come across people that train in BJJ and they will say BJJ is just a sport and it lacks a means to fight. I look at them as if they were crazy. I mean I expect this non-sense from BJJ haters but not from our own. Where are they getting these ideas? Have people forgot the old UFC fights, have they forgot the old Vale-Tudo fights from Brazil that were being done before there even was such as thing as MMA.

BJJ needs to go back to the old ways and become what it used to be....a fighting art....not a sport.

Seems the same thing that happened to Judo has happened to BJJ but in a scant fraction of the time. Probably due to so many BJJ schools specializing in MMA competitive training?

"Judo is a study of techniques with which you may kill if you wish to kill, injure if you wish to injure, subdue if you wish to subdue, and, when attacked, defend yourself" - Jigoro Kano (1889)
***Was this quote "taken out of context"?***

"The judoist has no time to allow himself a margin for error, especially in a situation upon which his or another person's very life depends...."
~ The Secret of Judo (Jiichi Watanabe & Lindy Avakian), p.19

"Hope is not a method... nor is enthusiasm."
~ Brigadier General Gordon Toney

Ive actually tried this online training program. at first it was something very interesting and some of it seemed pretty effective.
Then i started training under my Sifu now that holds multiple black belts and fought full contact back in PKL. As one can imagine, i didnt fair as well as i thought i would when it came to ground fighting. the nice thing about the online program is that it teaches you basic techniques so that if you do decide to really get involved, you already have your feet wet so to speak. The downside is that the online program doesnt teach you how to be loose, keep your head down, basic ground fighting principles.

The cringe factor for me is the willingness to lower the standards for rank in the art I love. Perhaps my standards for blue belt are too high, but knowledge of GC hardly a blue belt makes.

I think it's at least interesting to be able to expect what a person with a given rank knows, rather than guessing between whether they know a variety of positions fairly well, or if they have a single position where they have a lot of options from.
The idea that a person with the first level of promotion in a martial art is expected to be able to defeat someone with no experience in the art also kinda makes sense.

Well of course you wouldn't armbar a blue or purple. They have years of experience on you. They've defended hundreds of armbars and even know the combos that set them up, and you're expecting to pull one off on them right after you learned it??

Whenever I learn a new technique and want to add it to my game or just try to practice it, I don't go testing it on ranks above me. If I try something brand new against a brown belt or black belt, chances are they're going to defend it well - they've probably already seen the technique and defended it a hundred times more than I've attempted it.

I go test the new stuff on lower belts. Then when I get more comfortable with it, I'll work it into my rolls with the advanced belts. Eventually, the technique will become bread and butter, and then I'll really train it against higher belts to further improve the technique.

I'm not going to say this doesn't work, but I think this is a very long way of going about learning a technique. The whole idea of practicing a move with little resistance so that you can feel how it's supposed to work, perfecting that, then increasing the resistance while maintaining good technique seems like it makes more sense to me.
For example, if I wanted to learn to play a song on guitar, I wouldn't just read the chord changes and music notations, then try to play the full song at full speed. I would work on the song section by section, getting the fingerings, strumming, and rhythm correct, then work my way up to play that section at regular speed, then work on the other sections.